The office of the Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice has reacted to speculations that the Minister, Abubakar Malami, is behind the crisis rocking Abia State following a court ruling last week that sacked the governor, Okezie Ikpeazu.
Reacting on Sunday in a statement signed by his Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Salihu Othman Isah, the AGF said the Federal Government never gave directives to the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, to issue Certificate of Return to Uchechukwu Ogah declaring him Governor-Elect.
The statement said Malami “has definitely not taken any action either by spoken words or body language as far as this Abia governorship crisis is concerned.”
The AGF declared that “these rumours are untrue and a figment of the imagination of those pushing these selfish, shameless and irredeemable lies into public space which only translates to partisanship on the side of its purveyors.”
Malami noted that, “The constitutional powers for the legal opinion of his office have not been invoked on this issue. So far, nobody has approached him to proffer any legal opinion to it.”
He said as a “strong believer in the rule of law”, it is his belief that the law should naturally take its cause.
The AGF stressed that he will not be dragged into “this controversy and mind-games being played out by the various legal minds and spin doctors of both camps at this point.”
He therefore advised “parties involved” in the matter to “await the decision of the courts” and urged “those in the habit of dragging” him into “knotty issue of this kind even when it is yet to take a position” to “desist from these unwarranted presumptions henceforth.”
